World un-weary

Anthony Haden-Guest, British-born writer, cartoonist and observer of the social scene, lived in what he calls the "city-state" of San Francisco in the early '70s, when he wrote for the brand-new Rolling Stone. At the Serge Sorokko Gallery Wednesday afternoon, where he was hanging a show of cartoons from his new book, "The Chronicles of Now," he talked easily and wittily.

But he's a smart man who knows his way around journalists, and he's in the habit of double-thinking everything he says, pondering how the quote will look in print at the same time he's saying it. Maybe it's a habit ingrained from years of creating cartoons.

For example, he stresses that he doesn't wish to be corny, but 30 years after he lived here, he still finds San Francisco "astonishingly beautiful," in the way a Greek village or a patch of Ireland is singularly beautiful, and particularly welcoming. "Nobody looks around when they hear your accent."

After living in the United States for something like 20 years, Haden-Guest is "still a green-carder," ostensibly because he "just can't stand the paperwork" that would turn him into an official Yank. But there's another reason for noncitizenship: He considers himself more of a New Yorker than an American, and American humor, he stresses, is very regional.

The New York brand is "highly verbal," says Haden-Guest. "When Lenny Bruce performed in London, he was greeted with silence. The British just didn't get him." Although Haden-Guest is known for biting wit -- his introduction mentions work that deals with the "bruising, banal, embarrassing, peculiar or yes, terrible" -- the social commentary of the current cartoons seems particularly to tease the middle class. "Then he did get all the toxins out of his system," a woman says to two friends in one cartoon, "and there was so little left, I divorced him."

As to the art of combining images with written lines, the general American gold standard is New Yorker cartoons, and Haden-Guest, double-thinking again, notes before saying anything that could be construed as remotely critical that he's a great admirer of the magazine's achievements. He outlines two classic New Yorker cartoon themes: the tramp saying something that an upper-crust person might say, and "the dowager Duchess saying 'f-- off.' They're working- class people saying intellectual things and intellectuals saying working-class things." Haden-Guest has broader goals in mind, creating cartoons "about behavior. They're drawings as compressed novels."

"Well, if we can't talk you out of it," says a volunteer depicted manning a counseling hotline, "can we at least Webcast it?"

TELLING THE STORIES: Seven performers became witnesses to the collapse of the World Trade Center on Wednesday night, in a compelling reading of "What Happened: The September 11th Testimony Project" presented by the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. The "play," directed by PALM's Brad Rosenstein, was created by Amy Green and based on interviews by students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which lost more than 110 students, faculty members and alumni in the attack.

Alexis Lezin, Michael Gene Sullivan and Robert Weinapple -- was supposed to star Rita Moreno, and when she didn't show up, organizers were alarmed. It turned out, she explained the next day, that she'd flown to Los Angeles to be with her suddenly ill musical director. The show went on despite the hole in the cast, Moreno's focus on expressing love for the living perhaps a lesson well learned from Sept. 11.

FINALLY: If you want to make like an Osbourne or a Smith or a Minnelli, International Talent Casting in San Francisco is looking for families, traditional and non-, for "My Life as a Sitcom," a reality show that premieres on ABC in January.

CAVEAT ROCK 'N' ROLLER

"I don't have to worry about drugs with my children. They looked at what they did to Keith Richards and they thought, 'No.' "